New York|Scrambling to Fix the Subway: Slow Progress, but Much Work Remains

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Scrambling to Fix the Subway: Slow Progress, but Much Work Remains

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Metropolitan Transportation Authority workers making repairs at the Wall Street station on Friday. “It’s nonstop pressure for the workers and contractors to get as much done as possible,” said Joseph J. Lhota, the chairman of the transportation authority.CreditCreditChang W. Lee/The New York Times

Four months after Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo announced a state of emergency on the New York City subway and three months after the Metropolitan Transportation Authority instituted an $836 million rescue plan, transit officials said they have slashed the time it takes to respond to emergencies, reducing the average 45-minute response time by about half with an eventual goal of driving that figure down to 15 minutes.

In data to be released this week, the transportation authority said it would show that it is working toward meeting year-end goals regarding inspections and repairs at key points in the vast system. Mechanical failures have also declined in recent weeks, though officials were unable to provide precise figures.

“Think of it like a patient that has suffered severe trauma,” said Joseph J. Lhota, the chairman of the transportation authority. The first thing that needs to be done is to stabilize the patient, he said, and stop the bleeding. But officials said the bigger aim by early next year was to return service to the pre-crisis level, which would require reducing the number of major incidents by 40 percent. A major incident is defined as a problem that causes the delay of more than 50 trains. At the height of the crisis, there were more than 80 major incidents on average a month.

Those efforts, however, Mr. Lhota warned, could be jeopardized by an ongoing fight with City Hall over funding. The state agreed to pay half the cost of the emergency plan and said the city should pay the other half. Mr. Lhota said if the city does not contribute, the agency would have to stop hiring new workers in January. Officials said that 764 workers have been hired and they want to hire at least 1,600 more.

“We are on the cusp of restoring reliability back into the N.Y.C. subway system for the first time in quite a while and it would be a tragedy if this successful endeavor was derailed because of a lack of funding,” said John Samuelsen, the president of the International Transit Workers Union.

But city officials bristled at the state’s continued criticism over subway financing. “City riders are sick of this charade,” said Austin Finan, a spokesman for Mayor Bill de Blasio. “Funding half of their responsibility isn’t an option and holding hostage the completion of the plan is only going to hurt riders.”

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The closed Wall Street station is part of the FAST-TRACK initiative, which gives workers uninterrupted access to the tracks, signals, cables, lighting, third rail components and platform edges.CreditChang W. Lee/The New York Times

For riders, the best measure of success is on-time performance. But because there is a two-month lag in posting data, the most recent numbers are from August, which showed the same low on-time performance that had plagued the system for months, and transit officials said that it would not be a fair measure of their efforts.

“It’s nonstop pressure for the workers and contractors to get as much done as possible,” Mr. Lhota said. “From a mechanical aspect, I am feeling much better off.”

John Raskin, the executive director of the Riders Alliance, an advocacy group, said that numbers alone do not tell the story of riders’ experience.

“The measure of success shouldn’t be whether the subway system is in meltdown mode on a given day,” he said. “It should be whether people leave home in the morning with a reliable sense of when they will get to work, and that is not yet happening. There haven’t been as many meltdowns in the last few weeks, but there remains a low-grade sense of dread among riders that any day could be the day that subway delays upend everyone’s lives again.”

Mr. Raskin said the renewed focus on maintenance at the core of the emergency plan was a good stopgap solution, but it was not a substitute for a long-term plan.

“If we don’t follow up with a new signal system and new cars and other investments, we’ll be in crisis mode again and again,” he said.

Mr. Cuomo announced the emergency plan after months of constant disruptions and coverage by The New York Times about the decrepit state of the subway, including its fragile signal system and increasingly malfunctioning trains, and the escalating financial cost to riders.

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The subway emergency plan targets areas that cause the vast majority of delays in the system, such as signal malfunctions and track issues.CreditChang W. Lee/The New York Times

Despite some recent improvements, the sprawling system’s archaic infrastructure poses a constant challenge. Last Monday, at the height of the morning rush, a signal light failed at the Rockefeller Center station.

The signals are the traffic lights of the subway and when one fails trains come to a halt. A flagger needs to direct trains, a work order needs to be issued, a repair crew needs to get to the location and, finally, the problem needs to be fixed, however long that may take.

All the while, the effects ripple outward, stranding riders far from where the trouble began.

“When a signal goes out, you can have trains backed up from Manhattan to Canarsie,” said Paul Pietrofeso, the general superintendent in the signals department. On that Monday morning, the signal problems in Midtown Manhattan delayed riders on eight subway lines.

Even without breakdowns, the amount of work it takes every day to keep the trains running on the fraying system is staggering.

Over the course of one recent weeknight, workers removed 41,800 pounds of scrap debris, vacuumed 17,035 feet of track, cleared 1,310 feet of drain pipes, emptied 20 drain boxes, worked on 574 signal components, performed maintenance work on 175 switch components and 2,551 track components, scraped gunk off 425 feet of track and made two serious structural repairs to steel components.

Mr. Pietrofeso, a 30-year veteran of the transit system, knows well the challenges of trying to operate trains on outdated infrastructure. “We are like the fire department of the subway system,” he said, referring to his signal workers.

On the recent weeknight, his shift began by checking on the work of a crew replacing what is known as a subway stop on the E line at 53rd and Seventh Avenue in Manhattan. A stop is an iron arm that rises on the tracks after a train has passed through a station to ensure that another train behind it does not hit the train in front.

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Most of the work is done under a general work order that requires a section of track or a station to be closed overnight.CreditChang W. Lee/The New York Times

There are more than 4,000 stops in the system. Hundreds of them are more than 50 years old. Nearly every night, a stop is being replaced somewhere.

With so much work needing to be done, it is not possible to stop train traffic for every repair or replacement. So on this night, a half-dozen transit workers labored for 10 minutes at a time, climbing off the tracks every time a train rumbled into the station.

Bishwadyal Singh, 53, the supervisor on the job, said it would take at least six hours to get the old stop arm out and replace it with a new one.

The subway emergency plan targets the things that cause the vast majority of delays in the system, such as signal malfunctions, track issues, failing power infrastructure, water-related damage and corrosion, track fires, car breakdowns, police emergencies and station problems.

The second phase of the plan focuses more on long-term needs and capital improvement.

Most of the work is done under something known as a general work order that requires a section of track or a station to be closed overnight.

“The amount of productive time on a general order has been an intractable problem at the M.T.A. for decades,” said Patrick J. Foye, the president of the transportation authority.

Mr. Foye said one change was to extend the time a station was closed to maximize the work. In the past, work would start at midnight. Now, it begins at 10 p.m.

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A worker waiting for a train to pass. With so much work needing to be done, it is not possible to stop train traffic for every repair or replacement.CreditChang W. Lee/The New York Times

Mr. Pietrofeso, who began his shift Monday night in midtown, then headed down to Wall Street, where the station was closed. That station is part of the FAST-TRACK initiative, which gives workers uninterrupted access to the tracks, signals, cables, lighting, third rail components and platform edges.

Dozens of workers assigned different jobs fanned out across the tracks, guided by flashlights. Some were equipped with yellow shovels and scooped up trash. By 5 a.m., they would collect more than a ton of garbage in a small section about the length of the platform, off the tracks at the station.

Viorel Serban was part of the team examining the interlocking mechanism, which houses the equipment that controls signals.

If that mechanism, which moves after a train passes over it, is even a quarter of an inch misaligned, train traffic can come to a stop.

“Almost every night we find a problem,” Mr. Serban said. Once again, trash is the enemy. Something as simple as a soda can caught in the switch can gunk up the system and cause a shutdown.

Sergey Gayduk was part of the lubrication team, responsible for checking that the tracks were properly greased. When a train passes over an oil greaser, it depresses a release that squirts oil on the rail.

Other teams were inspecting rails and power issues.

As the 5 a.m. deadline neared, another crew was making a final check of the switches at the station. One switch was scheduled to be replaced in the next two weeks.

That job would require replacing hundreds of feet of rail, a crane to lift the large device and dozens of workers who would need at least 53 hours to get the job done. The station would have to be shut for that whole time.

“It’s a complicated dance,” Mr. Pietrofeso said. “I would be lying if I didn’t say it was a challenge sometimes.”

A version of this article appears in print on , on Page A19 of the New York edition with the headline: Laboriously Fixing the Subway System, With Much Still to Do. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe